


i do the protecting

by isoldewas



Series: carries [3]
Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Cary is even less equipped to dealing w shit, Drugs, F/M, Kerry is a jerk, M/M, Oliver is there for a split second but Cary is crushing HARD, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-04
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-04-07 21:53:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19093852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isoldewas/pseuds/isoldewas
Summary: “Fucking watch me,” she says.He was nine and she was eleven and she used curse words and stole her mom’s cigarettes and smoked them and didn’t cough that much anymore.(AU: Kerry's the main body)





	i do the protecting

**Author's Note:**

> so i was like, how can i write the same thing but different

“Fucking watch me,” she says. 

He was nine and she was eleven and she used curse words and stole her mom’s cigarettes and smoked them and didn’t cough that much anymore.

He told her he read it wasn’t good for you, and that he was scared he was going to die. Like the lit up cigarette, evolving into dust until she shakes it off. He’d also read Dorian Gray earlier that summer. 

She scoffed, a thing she’d picked up from her mother, a gesture she didn’t know how to navigate around, something she put as much feeling in as possible but was still coming up short.

You can’t do that Kerry, he tries again, mumbles the words under his nose, and she kicks him in the arm. He might have a bruise. She might have a bruise.

 

 

“Shit happens.” 

She curses all the time, so much it almost scares Oliver away. That’s where Cary appears for the very first time, unrehearsed and unwelcome, but he has to divert Oliver’s attention. From her words to him and he didn’t realize what being looked at would feel like. What it would be to look at Oliver, with his own eyes.

He thinks, _look at me. Look at me, not her, don’t listen to her, count me in; look at me._ But he is young, he is young and he gets crushes and Kerry is no help, she scoffs at him and says “He is married,” like it’s some sort of a remedy. It isn’t, it really isn’t. And Oliver tests them together and then he puts them in different rooms and asks Cary to unbutton his shirt. Cary removes it altogether, too hot and too eager and he is shy so it does make it a bit more subtle. Oliver turns his head, lifts an eyebrow and there is a half smile to his mouth. Cary sits down and pulls his shirt to his lap and completely screws up the baseline for future testing. Because he is both a future scientist and an awkward teenager it takes him years to come clean. At that point, a lot has changed. And a lot hasn’t.

But as he sits there an _I want I want I want, look at me_ scatters around his mind and he locks it up and he tries to find something that will make him feel this, but won’t disappoint Kerry. 

 

 

“Watch it,” she snaps. 

He is used to helping with the mechanical stuff, she gets way too bored way too easily, it’s instinct at this point: to leap out, to spare her the repetition of the same. 

But this is different, this is her and a woman and a bed and it should stay that way, probably should, and before his hand reaches the woman’s body Kerry pushes him right in and there he stays. 

This, she wants to do on her own, even if it’s repetitive, even if it’s dull from the outside. But then the woman touches her too and Kerry must have known it’d feel like this, it’s suddenly all worth it, and he gets why she wouldn’t want to share. 

And Cary wants to touch too. Just not the woman.

And inside, inside, that’s funny for what it is, he thinks _go away, let go, stop it stop it stop it_ and he hopes, he needs to know it’ll go away too, as similar things have gone away after a while of nothing happening. 

 

 

“Say that again,” she says quietly, slowly, dangerous. And he says it, again.

He’s not at his best, it’s not the greatest punchline he’s ever come up with and yet. 

She looks stunned, like he’d done something he doesn’t usually, ever, do. And then she laughs, the palm of her hand banging on the table and all that. The way she looks at him, like it’s a whole new light for him, well, it’s a whole new light to her. She’s rarely impressed and she is never kind enough to show it.

They get drunk: it’s the first time they sit together in a bar, they’ve decided he looks old enough, older even. 

They get really really really drunk and he keeps looking at people and wishing they’d put their hands on him. Kerry buys weed from a guy who looks younger than the both of them and goes out for a smoke.

He is left alone among the noise and the clinking of the glasses and the smell of beer on everything and he keeps looking around, searching.

 

 

“Shut it,” she giggles at him when he can’t stop laughing as they walk down the corridor. 

She tells him to be quiet, he can’t remember whether it’s because they are on a mission or she only paid for one or it’s just Kerry being mean. 

They come into the hotel room, just him and Kerry, and she slurs “You’ve got to relax.” She too feels wound up. She is also high so there is that.

He hasn’t yet figured out whether that means he is high: he is nineteen and she is twenty-five and that means he is twenty-five too but he doesn’t look it. 

She slumps on the bed and gets on her back, tries to pull her vest and pants off, weirdly incapable of compelling her hands to move in sync.

He tries to help her, and even then it takes some time. 

“Look, it’s like this,” she says without introductions and her hands land in between her thighs and she spares him a glance before she moves again and she asks “do you want to know”. He does. She moves. 

And he knows how it happens and he even remembers how it feels: quite like his own, but he has never seen her like this and he wants to keep seeing her, and she is watching him. She's looking at him, eye to eye to hand to knees.

She goes for her underwear next and pulls it off with no graceful intent to it but it still looks like the most amazing thing and terrible and amazing again. 

Her trousers slide off the bed and Cary gets up as if her clothes on the floor change the dynamic of this completely, and he can’t just sit there anymore.

Long legs and long fingers and long neck, her back arches, and her hips, it’s like she is trying not to move, to keep him in her line of sight. He helps her a little, surges forward and ends up further than he thought he’d be, a hand on her bent knee, and then down her thigh.

His one leg on the bed, the one on the floor is barely supporting, barely usable when her hands reach his shoulders and her mouth follows: to his collarbones, to his neck, to his shoulders and then away.

And he is very aware of what’s happening and beneath the beer and the joint, so is she.

They are afraid too, really fucking scared it’s going to end up hurting them. Then suddenly he is silent, and with one hand he draws a circle on her skin, a sign, like a math equation she can not place. And when he gets to the two parallel lines the answer is self-evident, like this is what he has been figuring out. He lands on the bed, because if she hadn’t pushed him away yet, she won’t now either. Her legs are around his back and he never felt this, like power and violence and kindness mashed up together.

The heels of her feet dig into his sides, his hands wander without his permission, but maybe her permission is enough and maybe the laws of transference apply. Maybe it’s not that different from her touching herself, and then his hand slides down her side and the other up her thigh and it feels different, very very not like it’s just her, and his flicker of a theory is disproved by every next move. Her hand on his belt, her fingers hooking the waistband of his underwear and her breasts to his chest.

Different then. Not at all the same. 

 

 

“Well, fuck me.”

That one she says twice. 

The first time she is trying to teach him how to fight and he is thirteen and a half when he actually throws a punch and he doesn’t leave a bruise but he does hit his mark.

And he thinks he understands why she likes punching him so much. If it feels like this, like hurting on a loop, but with an edge to it, like it’s not his hurt, like it’s not really pain— it’s nice.

He wonders what else feels like this, what he can do to her that would resemble that. 

He finds that one out long before she says that for the second time.

 

 

“What are you staring at?”

This year the spring is warm. They go out in the park, Kerry goes for a run, and half an hour (one full circle around the lake) later, she lies down in the grass next to him and smiles, wrinkles around her eyes, her mouth, her teeth yellowish: she smokes a lot these days. She’d quit for six years and she lit one up when he was out of it on a hospital bed. 

She’d smoked a pack before they said she could go back in and one more cigarette before she actually went and looked at the damage.

He woke up with her not in the room but home, packing. 

She’d decided to run away when he’d get better, decided to uproot the both of them with no consideration for him. She’d put his stuff in unmarked boxes and he is sure she threw some of it out when it didn’t fit the space she allowed for his clothes and his books and the draft of his thesis and him. 

And he had to stay her hand, actually stay her, his fingers on her forearm and she’d looked at him like _what would you know, you haven’t almost lost anything, anyone, ever._

But he’d lost exactly what she’d lost, and when Kerry remembers that, they stay.

And when the spring comes around she is okay with (and okay enough to be) leaving him alone for half an hour. She owes it to herself to check up on him, but it has almost been a year and he tries very hard to prove that not everything’s a threat to his fragile constitution and _would you look at this, Kerry, I too can run,_ even if he is out of breath not two minutes in, and she tries to know it.

And when she lays down next to him in the grass, her top is hugging her torso, the earth is cold beneath her bare back and it makes him shiver. The fast rise and fall of her chest catches his eye and he wants and he wants and wants.

She looks at him, unexpectedly kinder, calmer than usual, like she isn’t out to kill anyone anymore.

That’s the year she doesn’t punch him once.

 

 

“Don’t you get it?”

It’s her fiftieth birthday. Today she is half a century’s old and wrinkled and with strands of grey hair that shine in the sun. Brilliant, blinding.

And his hair was always mousy, Cary’s slim and with that permanently tired look to him, plus the glasses add up to his age. And before she could pass for an older sister, and now they are of terribly different generations and it stings. That is something he’ll never have back, being on equal footing. 

He avoids the mother-and-her-child comparison with a fierce determination and only brings up their appearance in study groups or campus or library-like settings. There they blend among the youth, a mean-looking crowd, and the tenured professors: fifty-somethings with strands of grey hair and ten-year-old suits, same cut to them as Cary’s own. It’s like she is teaching him the secrets of ergonomics instead of pleading with him to end this study session and go for a tour a bite a walk anything that isn’t sitting still. She puts her hand on his thigh, careless, and says, “anything that’s not sitting still.” This is where they are at. 

And, yeah, he does get it, but he also likes how they look reflected in the big mirror walls of the university library: like they’re working on a doctorate _together_ , which they are, kind of, only by then they are hopelessly tethered to Oliver and Melanie and Ptonomy and the whole of that bunch and they feel like a family. Like their family felt before their dad walked out on his daughter and on his wife and on the young neighbor boy wandering around their house in Kerry’s clothes.

 

 

“Fuck me,” again.

The second time she says it’s her fortieth minus fourteen years, and Kerry is asking. To be fair, she wouldn’t ask, if he wasn’t- if he didn’t start, if he didn’t, if not for that thing at twenty-five on that motel bed.

And at thirty-two. And thirty-one. And, to be fair, twenty-three should count too even if it hadn’t felt like trespassing yet. At twenty-three he still thought maybe it’s not that different from everything else. And, you know, maybe it wasn’t.

 

 

“Might as well,” she says mockingly and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, like it’d help the mess.

She is sweating, her legs hurt, and she doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that things have consequences now. A fall doesn’t break her yet but it causes damage and she has to deal with the bruises with care and kindness and Cary has most of that in between them so he cares and tends to and explains: she is not unconditionally strong anymore and it’s not coming back. She stares at him, the expression on her blank before hurt. Like she didn’t expect to arrive at this. 

He’d told her, _let me do this, mine won’t hurt as much,_ and she had taught him how to fight and how to pick a lock but she hadn’t practiced the giving up part, the sharing part, still can’t pull off the _you do it, you might be better at it,_ that trust thing he’s convinced they should be able to do.

Yet she knows how to, trusts him a whole lot with her body and her sex life and her feelings. And he is her, he knows her, but the fact that Kerry can fall in love still comes as an unexpected blow.

They are not calling it anything, because to do that (and it would be up to him to do it) he’d have to find the words or the time; and he doesn’t want to put it into words or to place it in the restricted confines of just one moment; by the time it becomes a thing, unbearable and big, it’s already all too much to fit into a coherent narrative. Not that he hid it well, not that hiding it was ever a priority, but they didn’t talk about it. There was a hotel and there was a “do you want to know” and that was enough for the both of them until they’ve looked at it again and thought, no, not enough. 

She knew where they stood and so did he and that, the equal footing in this at least, they try to maintain even as one of them gets their shirt and pants off while the other is still in their coat.

He gets closer to her, her arms around his neck and that coat of hers is very warm, and it scratches at his arms. Her hands are warm and her eyes are warm too. 

 

 

“Shit,” she says. “Whatever.”

She is old now, long grey hair, a certain loneliness to her. Things fall from her hands, she has tremors and doubts and fears that have nothing to do with actual threats. 

She can’t fight and insists on taking away his bruises anyway.

Her voice is soft on “whatever,” and she’s done trying to pull it off. He takes off her clothes, a careful hand on her bad shoulder that won’t heal ever since she tripped over their bed in the dark.

Cary orders dinner and sits down next to her, he looks fifty and feels like fifty-seven. Like she felt when they were that: tired, bored, slow and also, like time is rushing forward. She speaks in short sentences, explaining the best way to break down the door. She looks distant, detached from this.

The very idea outrageous enough so it takes years to settle right: defeat can be graceful too.

He’s not sure he’ll ever break down that door she’s speaking of or pick a single lock by himself. He listens while she talks and lets his mind wander. He still doesn’t know whether he’ll die when she does. 

He’ll just have to find out.

**Author's Note:**

> is it too early to say that i’m keeping the fandom alive ?


End file.
